An alleged screen capture of the ATI version of Rydermark (saved and reposted to preserve metadata)

An alleged screen capture of the NVIDIA version of Rydermark (saved and reposted to preserve metadata)

A difference map of the two images

"Rydermark developers" make bold claims which turn out to be nothing more than a Photoshop hoax

It would appear The Inquirer was quick to jump the gun on a story accusing NVIDIA of lying about full DirectX 9 support.
The story accused NVIDIA of not allowing developers to use
24-bit or 32-bit shader precision. Instead it claims NVIDIA forces
developers into using 16-bit shader precision as the technique is faster. This is a
problem as DirectX 9 compliancy requires 24-bit shader precision or
better. "Rydermark" is not a commercially shipping application yet, and has had very little information published to confirm its authenticity.

It turns out the images "proving" NVIDIA’s
wrongdoings were nothing more than poorly done Photoshopped images. The
NVIDIA rendered image appeared to have blurrier water while the ATI
rendered image had sharper water detail. However, the
ATI rendered image just didn’t look right with poor cut offs and a
creation date three minutes after the NVIDIA rendered image. A difference image of the two JPG files can be seen to the right, with the outline of the modified area clearly visible in the ATI image. This would suggest the NVIDIA image was the original source image, and that the ATI version was modified afterwards.

A difference of the metadata from both images reveals that the NativeDigest delimiter is identical for both images, but has two different InstanceIDs. This would be consistent with an image that was modified and saved twice. In the author's defense, images that are created and saved on his computer have distinct metadata tags that are very easily identifiable. These are not present in the two images supplied by The Inquirer for "Rydermark" -- suggesting the images may not have been modified by the author.

When the story broke yesterday I examined the pictures that the INQ posted. I'm not an expert on photo analysis, but I could help but notice that the NVIDIA pic was 150 kb and the ATI pic was 170 kb. The story tasted sour pretty quickly.

So they got a few stories right and there rep got better. How short are memories are.

INQ is a shot gun tech news pub. Have enough monkies write enough crap and some of it will turn out right.
But thats more luck then anything else.
The truth is INQ is 99% crap news. The are like the 'news' paper at the check out lane which always claim to have found the devil or good, or know when the earth ends.

Don't forget the "reverse hyperthreading" story they started, and then later post another story saying it's nonsense. (Which it obviously is, but that didn't stop them from starting the rumour in the first place)

They are good at digging up information though. Yes, a lot of it turns out to be false, but occasionally they get hold of some factual information before anyone else.

They started it out in the english speaking world though, in fact they got it out of the confines of that french site where it would probably have stayed.
That's the strength and weakness of the inq, they aren't afraid to speak out, and they don't sign NDA's, and they are the only ones that don't AFAIK.
So if you keep a grip on your senses and check the stories they bring out yourself then you have a fine site to read and feed your curiosity.

True, they dug it up, but the origin of the rumour is still x86-Secret.

I generally find The Inquirer to be very good at reporting news and rumours and not stating things as absolute fact if they don't have confirmation for it from sources. The no-NDA policy is something I applaud. A lot of people also state that The Inquirer is wrong in more cases than they are right, yet no one provides numbers or facts showing just that. (I can agree with the lack of spell checks, though, that even irks me, and my native tongue is Swedish.)

Although in this case, the look of the screenshots doesn't leave much to the imagination. It's pretty evident that there's something funny going on. Hopefully it'll be rectified as soon as possible.

X86-Secret clearly stated that the technology of "Reverse HT" is planned for K10 and considering that they were talking to an AMD engineer when they obtained that info, I would say that it's better than just a rumour. Also note that the idea behind "Reverse HT" is not new as both AMD and Intel have been talking about the possibility of this well before all those recent stories appeared - you can find a lot on it in their long-term roadmaps and their technology research section - note that "Reverse HT" or "Anti HT" are just "make-up" terms; look for speculative threading or cluster multithreading instead.

The Inquirer, OTOH, pushed the "Reverse HT" as something already found in K8 and even managed to get some estimates of the performance too. How did they do that? I wonder. This has all been proven to be false by X-bit labs and the Inquirer, themselves.

b) If one image has more detail than the other (as is the case) and both are saved with the same compression level (as is the case), then the one with more detail will produce a bigger file (as is the case).

In other words, you are looking at an inevitable technical consequence of the JPEG compression algorithm and using it to draw conclusions about the source of the original, uncompressed image.